"Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly after all these years, and has snatched you back," she said slowly, as if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken. "Quick! Tell me!" She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat's face, and fear growing in them more and more visibly. "You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey. You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who claimed to know me." "Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner," cried Cynthia, with a rising excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection. Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster which had overtaken her little visitor. "He remembered that he had seen you--Wait! Now I have it-- In a long corridor, in Metz, in '71." M. Poizat nodded. "The corridor of the Arsenal. Colonel Challoner--it's so you call him?--he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went to see the Marshal Bazaine." "Yes," replied Cynthia. "And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the Germans for the betrayal of Metz." "That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde Jobert's hands. But details of her story were true." "For instance?" asked Cynthia. "That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the Germans and Bazaine." "That was true?" "Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is of Lorraine. Her father was of those sturdy ones who would not live under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no longer any house." He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably. She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat. "I think you had better come back at five," she said, "and tell my husband your story." "But of course he knows it already," cried M. Poizat. Cynthia shook her head.